Hawaii’s public schools are launching a new online lunch payment system starting Monday.
The state Department of Education is launching EZSchoolPay, which allows users to manage and pay for students’ meal accounts online and through a mobile app available for iPhones, iPads and Android devices.
The EZSchool Pay service is offered by Harris School Solutions’ eTrition software program and is being implemented after a three-month transition process for all 256 schools.
The DOE’s previous contract offering online school payments, SchoolCafe, ended last year.
“We negotiated a $0.13 convenience fee with the new vendor, saving parents $0.67,” said Dann Carlson, assistant superintendent of school facilities and support services, in a news release. “With the new meal payment system, the transaction fee is also lower at 1.99 percent. The prior transaction fee was 5 percent.”
Parents still have the option of paying for school lunches by cash or check at no charge.
UH astronomer gets national honor
An astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has been named one of the National Academy of Sciences’ 84 newly chosen members.
John Tonry, who has been with the UH-Manoa Institute for Astronomy since 1996, joins an elite group of roughly 2,300 exceptional scientists worldwide. National Academy of Sciences members are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. It is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
Tonry is a professor and expert in developing technologies to survey the sky, including the detection of moving and variable objects, such as exploding stars and asteroids. He is spearheading the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project, a pair of half-meter telescopes that patrol the entire visible sky twice per night to provide warning of an asteroid on its final, impact trajectory.
